For these Flyers, Snider knows there's no quick fix

Comcast-Spectacor Chairman Ed Snider, right, speaks at a news conference with Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren Oct. 7 as the team announced the firing of coach Peter Laviolette. However, a coaching change hasn’t altered the Flyers’ perplexing struggles this season, leaving Snider at a loss for what to do next. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

VOORHEES, N.J. — It would probably be easier to take if he had a referee to blame for something. Perhaps a player’s parents to fume over (remember those days?). Or a captain to demote. Or a coach who’s been around a bit too long whom he can thank and send on his un-merry way.

Ed Snider has none of those easy answers these days. The coach thing? Been there, fired that this season.

The captain? Well, he looks like he’s too much under the gun, but what’s the point? Where do you go from there, the general manager? Well maybe, but Paul Holmgren’s quick to accept as much of the blame as he dares.

But in reality, Snider, the Flyers’ chairman who’s more “puzzled” than perturbed these days, knows he already had pinpointed the real solution to his team’s embarrassingly poor performances. Of course, it’s not easy to fire everybody in the building.

“I’ve been in the game for 47 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Snider said Friday, a day after his club was blanked by the Devils, 3-0, and unceremoniously booed off the ice at Wells Fargo Center.

Along the way, the Flyers remained in the Metropolitan Division cellar, locked into the next-to-last spot in the Eastern Conference standings, and are now runaway leaders in the rankings gauging the most clueless offenses in the league at 1.46 goals per game.

“When Paul let (former coach) Peter Laviolette go, I said we can’t fire all the players; now see what we have. I’m hoping they’ll snap out of it and show us the kind of talent that they’ve shown in the past, and what we believe they still have.”

The Flyers have scored two goals in their last four games. That includes losses to likely playoff pretenders New Jersey and Carolina, and a 7-0 beatdown at the hands of a Washington team missing Alex Ovechkin last Friday.

Overall, the local hockey heroes are 4-10-1, and have scored an almost impossibly low 22 goals in those 15 games. They have played most of their early-season games at home, have long stretches against better teams coming up and show no signs of improving.

In short, it’s been so bad, there’s really no point exercising your anger over it. Not even if you’re payroll provider Ed Snider.

“We’ve had teams that have struggled. Sometimes we’ve had bad goaltending, but we’re scoring four goals and we’re giving up five. But I’ve never seen a team that can’t score, particularly with the talent that we have,” Snider said. “We’ve got to figure out what to do to overcome it.

“It’s a constant thing to evaluate talent. Players are good and they struggle, and they go through certain things but usually not all at once. And we know what these guys can do. It’s not like they’re all new guys and we’ve never seen them before. Everyone knows what Claude Giroux can do and what kind of talent he has. Jake (Voracek) scored 22 goals last year and he’s struggling. Everybody’s struggling. And it’s a puzzle that we have to resolve and we’re working very, very hard to do that.”

Yes, it’s a puzzle all right. One that could only be solved if the players wake up or if Holmgren finally breaks them up.

It couldn’t be solved by canning Laviolette. So it remains to be seen if Holmgren can pull off a significant trade that might wake up the millionaire ghosts napping in the new, cushy locker room.

If not, you’d have to wonder if Holmgren’s job status would stay intact.

Snider gave no indication it wouldn’t. Probably not a good idea to ask the fans.

“It’s upsetting,” Snider said of the bellowed booing, which last Friday was spiced by “Fire Holmgren!” chants. “Paul understands it, as he said to the press after it happened. ... Next they’ll be calling for my head and I don’t blame them.”

A better option would be for the players to blame themselves, then somehow play better for it. Of course, promised pictures don’t come together so easily as that.

“It’s a puzzle,” desperately struggling captain Giroux said. “We’re trying to know what’s going on and get everybody on the same page. And (Snider) wants to win as bad as us. I think when we communicate and everybody gets on the same page, that’s when we’re going to go back to winning games.”

Apparently, Giroux means go back at least two seasons. As in, the last time this team was good enough to even think about making the playoffs.

Playoffs?

Maybe head coach Craig Berube can cue up that old Jim Mora press conference tape again.

Instead, he’ll trot out his sixth dozen or so new line combination Saturday when the Edmonton Oilers come to Philly for a riveting matinee.

“I’m trying to find some life and some spark offensively,” Berube said. “Just trying to find some combinations that can get some offense going. I guess I’m not seeing what I want to see from it. So you mix it up. I’d like to get some lines that have some chemistry right now and keep it together, but I haven’t seen that.”

The only thing going for the Flyers is the kind offer by the NHL to actually play all 82 games this season. So there’s plenty of time to recover in the standings in what looks like a very mediocre Eastern Conference.

Everyone in that cushy, clubby locker room is confident they can do that. It’s the only answer they can muster.

“It’s the same story every day,” Giroux said. “You have to enjoy the game and obviously it’s hard to enjoy the game when you’re playing like we are playing right now. We need to enjoy it a little bit more. We go through games, and if you do one bad shift or one (bad) power play and (fans) start booing, obviously it puts on more pressure. Then you want to do a little bit more.

“It’s not acceptable. We’re a better team than this. We’ve got to go and play the games and start winning them.”